Food thoughts from France, the US and where ever else we happen to be. Focused on local and seasonal food. Recipes, philosophy, photos, memories, experiments and ideas.

Sunday, 18 December 2011

Travelling with & for Food

Eastern Sierraswith plane engine

We arrived in Oakland, California for our winter visit to the West Coast having outdone ourselves. No, really - I believe I've already bragged about the travel sandwiches that KK makes for me that make fellow passengers drool with envy, but this was different. The previous evening we grilled a side of wild caught salmon and ate it with Carolina Gold Rice, wilted spicy greens from the garden and an improvised and wholly delicious sorrel sauce – sorrel from the garden, loads of butter, some wine from the box left over from BGK’s visit last winter and the yolk of a freshly laid egg of the white hen. Thanks, white hen. So we mixed our leftover salmon with a very little mayonnaise and took with us slices of home-made bread, arugula & mustard greens from the garden and jolly tangerines. It was all delicious and so much nicer than airport food, which in any case, we wouldn’t have had time to purchase, as we made our flight with barely five minutes to spare - luckily it was only two gates away, barely far enough to get out of breath.

So, back to Oakland. KK had already requested a food pilgrimage to the Nordic House on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley (http://www.nordichouse.com/ & facebook.com/nordichouse) to buy Scandewegian food for Christmas. It's a proper store - i.e. smallish, with wooden floors and shelves and everything visible from one place. Christmas decorations, books, candles that only smell of candle and specifically specific cooking tools.

Aebleskiver pan for Danish pancakes

Fattigmann cutter (???) for cookies

our Danish wedding cake was like this

As well as a vast panoply of implements for cutting and slicing cheese. In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Blomquist goes to stay on the island and looking through the drawers in the kitchen of the cabin, notices the absence of cheese slicer. This is of major cultural importance - we live in a house with four cheese slicers (and spare cheese wires) and hardly ever eat Danish cheese. The French house has no cheese slicers. There was a lot of pickled fish - mostly of the herring variety (delicious looking smoked eel), cured & fresh sausages and many kinds of extremely buttery cheeses. I remembered eating Samso as a child in Welwyn Garden City and so BGK kindly bought some for me but there were also a dozen varieties of Havarti, Gouda, Danbo aged and with caraway, Esrom (another mystery cheese from childhood) and creamy blue cheeses, some in tubes (!). We left, not quite weighed down but with the essentials – leverpostej (liver paté) & medisterpolse (Danish pork sausage) – the anchors of a well-behaved Danish cold table. Asier was new to me - pickled cucumbers to be eaten with leverpostej. I have tasted it. There were delicious looking biscuits & chocolates, marzipan and licorice in many forms, but we resisted the lure. Except for the essential palaeg chokolade - thin tablets of dark (or milk if you must) chocolate especially designed to be eaten on buttered bread. We Frenchies like to eat dark chocolate on buttered bread and the Dutch eat chocolate sprinkles on bread, but it was a revelation to me that someone actually deliberately designed chocolate for bread. And it's good and you can't find it just anywhere (it doesn't even appear on the website). In Munich airport I was thrilled to discover a German equivalent - a little thicker but still perfekt. As you can see, the packet is still intact!

KK then mentioned that on a previous visit to the Nordic House, AK had taken him to an ice cream shop which he remembered quite fondly, so he nipped back into the store and asked for directions. Sure enough, it was just around the corner and we hied ourselves thither for dessert.

ICI– 2948 College Avenue, Berkeley – their slogan is “Ici – ice-cream made here” – so full points for punnishness. It’s a small store front on a street with interesting small shops and eateries, including a shop selling beautiful wool and silk clothing from Nepal and Burma – fabulous. But I digress….we ate: Meyer Lemon ice cream – deliciously creamy and fragrant; Pear and Quince sorbet – pretty in pink and slightly grainy – excellent flavour; Chilli, Cashew and Coconut Ice cream – not overwhelmingly coconutty (a plus in my book) with the chewiness of slightly toasted cashews and a point of chilli; Pistachio and Sour Cherry ice cream - looked so good I tasted it twice despite my pistachio problem, with a depth of pistachio flavour and the tartness of the cherries to help lift the flavour; and Coconut Sweet Rice – light and pleasant. They make their own cones but we did not have a cone – not even one between us, which we regret. They were selling (rather expensive) ginger snap and Meyer Lemon ice cream sandwiches – what a good idea! Regret those. And we did fall for an impulse buy of passionfruit marshmallows – guess whether they were good? In fact, marshmallows are not something to which I am culturally habituated, but a real, proper marshmallow made from the mallow and delicately flavoured with passion fruit which is a flavour I cannot resist is not bad. Their menu says that they make ice cream bonbons - bite-sized squares of ice cream dipped in chocolate - quelle bonne idée! I feel a dessert party coming on.

On the following day we went to .... that's a story for tomorrow but it does involve food and especially Meyer Lemons - bon appétit

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About Me

Friends and food. Food and friends. Food with friends. Food for friends. Food is a great connector. My French family fostered in me an appreciation and interest in food (and drink), later enriched by my travels and sojourns in far flung parts of the world, where quite often we ate terrible food. Later, I became an accomplished cook thanks largely to KK, who loves food, understands the social and chemical complexities of cooking and eating and has a fine palette. We talk about food as we eat and as we cook. We collect food and store too much of it. As one of my dear friends said one day at a party "Oh Cécile, the food! The people! But the food!"